The Presence Project: SOUNDSCAPE

The Builders Association and dbox, SUPER VISION: SOUNDSCAPE

SUPER VISION tells three stories

1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveller gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the boundaries of datasurveillance.

2. A young woman (Jen), addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmother's past, the Grandmother slips into senility.

3. A father covertly exploits his young son's personal data to meet the demands of the family's lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father's control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere.

Dan Dobson

Nick Kaye: How do you evolve the sound through the rehearsal process?

Dan Dobson: We always do it together. I rarely work outside of the room where everybody else is working. When we start a workshop all the technology is present. I don’t know if there were some little ideas that we had had earlier on in our very first Ohio (Wexner) workshop that did survive all the way through. Then for a long time we had been thinking about what data sounds like: ‘data’. At one point one of the dbox guys was playing a guitar with sensors on his fingers - so there are just these kind of weird tinkley sounds - and this is ‘data’.

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Dan Dobson: Our first show, MASTER BUILDER (1994) was with cassette tapes. You cued up and rolled it back a little bit with your finger and so on – we made those loops on reel-to-reel machines with 54 loops and it was a lot of fun. Now I am using a programme called Ableton Live, which is made for people who work live - and it is an unbelievably well thought out piece of software that allows me to do everything I want to do. Apparently nobody really uses for theatre. A lot of DJ-type people use it. It is very loop-based – I was given the concept of loop-based stuff when I started with MASTER BUILDER. So I have just worked that way since.

Nick Kaye: When you say loop-based what to do you mean?

Dan Dobson: It means, really, just the way that the music or sound works with the theatrical – with actors speaking. I have always found if you put in a melody or song you are saying a lot with that piece of music. It usually isn’t necessary. So we have always worked by using smaller, subtler, repetitive things. It is there, you hear it at some point, but you really just don’t notice and you pay attention to the performance - it just supports very well. Loop-based stuff just works better for our kind of theatre. And this programme is really forgiving and flexible. It’s so easy to change things – and change them dramatically. It has been a lot of fun using this software. Before I would work out a tape or CDs and that takes time. Here you just replace a sound or just have a sound right away – so that made everything much smoother and fun.

SUPER VISION credits